Rebirth
by hochrami
Summary: Born out of "Liara's Goodbye", this story takes place 40 years after the memorial service on Thessia. For the first time in decades, Liara hears from an old friend, with an interesting proposition.


It had been 40 years. I'd mourned him. I'd moved on. Still, every day, I missed him.

Every year, I'd go back to the memorial stone we placed all those years ago and visit our memories. Memories I'd sung to him could never be destroyed when I said my goodbye, accepting that he was gone. Sitting next to him, I could almost feel our arms entwined as we gazed out over the sea together, resting in the peace that had come after the war. I closed my eyes, allowing me to feel the breeze on my arms and crest, hear the waves washing over the beach below us, and avoid the knowledge that he wasn't really there. My omni-tool chirped with a new message, pulling me from my reverie, and I groaned with the interruption.

Looking down, I saw a message from Miranda Lawson. I thought it curious that she'd be sending me a message today. I hadn't heard from her in decades.

"I need to speak with you. It's urgent. It's about Shepard."

_What can she _possibly_ have to tell me about Shepard, today of all days?_

I sighed, stood up, kissed my fingertips and touched them to the stone. "I love you", I whispered to him, and turned toward the house.

When I arrived in my office, I settled in at my terminal, pulled up Miranda's message, and made the call.

"Liara! Thank you for calling", she began. Then her expression changed, and I realized that my eyes and cheeks were still wet with tears I hadn't realized I'd been crying. Maybe I hadn't moved on as much as I thought I had. "I'm sorry for disturbing you today, but I didn't think you'd want this to wait."

"It's OK, Miranda. How can I help you?"

"Do you remember, on the Citadel, when Shepard's clone tried to take over his identity?"

_Of course I remember, why are you bringing this up today?!_ "Yes, why?"

Normally very composed, confident, certain of what she wanted to say before she said it, I was surprised when words started almost falling out of her mouth. "I recently starting having this nagging thought that I just couldn't get out of my head. I spent years trying to learn how _not _to think of Shepard, I just couldn't cope with it, but this wasn't going away. I thought I was going crazy, but I decided that the only way I'd get the thoughts to go away would be to actually see them through. So I went digging. After the fiasco on Lazarus Station, the Illusive Man said it had been destroyed by a remote detonation and he'd sent a team to make sure all the evidence had been destroyed. The thought occurred to me that he wouldn't let all that knowledge go to waste, especially since the station was in deep space and had gone dark, you'd almost have to run into it to see it out there."

She was talking too fast and her thoughts weren't organized. Whatever she was trying to tell me had her quite flustered, and she'd lost the control that had always been so characteristic of her.

"Miranda, slow down; what are you trying to say?"

She took a deep breath before continuing, "Right. Sorry. When I headed up the Lazarus Project, I kept meticulous notes, detailed every step and every result, and I kept _everything_ backed up. Despite not believing that he'd destroyed Lazarus Station, I had assumed that the Illusive Man had taken all that information when I left Cerberus, and that my research, our equipment, and the clones had been destroyed in the war."

"Wait. Did you say, clones?"

"Yes Liara. We grew them for extra… parts, and we had more than one. It was a safeguard against organ contamination or some other kind of damage that would require more than one of something. We were thorough in our planning, because we didn't believe we had time to waste growing a new one, so we made four. And I found one. Liara, I was right. The Illusive Man didn't destroy that base and one of the clones survived the attack that Wilson triggered intact! He's bloody perfect."

"Are you telling me that there is a living, breathing Shepard clone laying around in some derelict space station? Because if you are, it can stay there for all I care. I don't need another lunatic clone destroying the memories and legacy Shepard left me with."

"No, Liara, that's not it at all. The clone is just a vessel. But there's more. During the project, I started feeling like something wasn't right. Jacob told me I was being paranoid, but that paranoia paid off. I suspected there was a mole in the project, so I kept encrypted backups of everything, fully redundant, logged under a false username, and stored off the Cerberus network. I took incredible pains to make sure even the Illusive Man didn't know about them. I suspected the Shadow Broker's involvement, and didn't trust anything. When I found the clone, I went looking and, Liara, the drives were there, too. I've got everything. My project notes, process documentation, equipment schematics, everything you gave us of his memories, it's all here! The only thing that's missing would be his memories since he was revived and we have a backup of all that right here in front of us!"

My mind was starting to swim as I tried to make sense of what she was telling me. "Where?"

She simply pointed. "You. He was your bondmate. Everything that made him, well, him, was shared with you, and you were climbing inside your own head to see him again 40 years ago. Every memory he made after he woke up became a part of you. Even his personality is in there, I'm sure of it. I saw how you changed the longer you were with him, and your reactions to things were almost predictably Shepard the last time we saw each other. You melded with him right before the final push in London. He'll have everything up to that moment. Liara, I can build the program again, and we can bring him back. We already have a perfectly healthy body, the rest will almost be _easy!_"

I tried to think things through. Tried to figure out what Shepard would have done, what he'd want me to do. I couldn't make sense of it and was trying to calm myself when I heard myself say, "Where do I need to go?"

I don't recall much after this, but Miranda later told me that she'd tried to calm me and tell me that it would take time to rebuild the equipment from the schematics, but I just kept asking her, "Where do I need to go".

8 days later, I landed on Sanctum. The planet had been deserted and survived the war mostly intact. Miranda met me at the spaceport, greeted me warmly, and escorted me inside. When we arrived at her lab, she paused at the door.

"Liara…"

"Is he in there?"

"Yes, but, you should understand, I said this would be easy, but…"

"I understand, Miranda. I understand there are going to be risks. I understand that this may not work. I understand that I'm hanging hope on the whisper of a wind on a deserted world, but Miranda, if there's any chance at all, I have to try!"

She took a breath to speak, but stopped short and I saw her decide something. "Ok."

Miranda opened the door and I was surprised to see an immaculately clean work space. There was a hospital bed in the middle of the room, beside which stood a rolling computer terminal. A long, black work surface lined the back wall, with 2 breaks in it for sinks. Overhead storage was bolted to the wall above that. The space was illuminated from above by recessed lighting, and a door stood at either end. To my right, behind the closest door and visible through a bank of windows, was a smaller room Miranda had purposed for building the equipment she needed. I didn't ask how she'd managed to acquire all of it, but made a mental note to make sure she was reimbursed for her expenses. The door on the far end of the room gave no indication of what was hidden behind it, and instinctively walked up to it.

Miranda followed and asked, "Are you sure you want to see him now?"

"How can I not? He's right here…" My voice trailed off as I spoke.

"Not yet, Liara. He's still in your head. In that room is a shell. A vessel. We haven't put him back in there yet."

"I want to see him. Please. It can't be any worse than the last time I saw him in a box."

Miranda opened the door and stepped aside to let me pass. Inside, the room was vacant, save a long, somewhat battered, but clearly functional stasis pod. The once gleaming metal surface had been scuffed and scratched, and the view port was discolored, but still transparent. My breath caught in my throat as I walked toward the pod. My eyes closed when I reached it and I stood motionless for several long moments, my head unwilling to look down, until I heard Miranda behind me saying, "It's OK. I'm here."

I looked down, opened my eyes, and my legs buckled as my emotions battled each other for supremacy and I sobbed. "Shepard. Oh Goddess, it's Shepard." I knelt there staring at his face, that perfect face, for what seemed like hours before I realized Miranda was still behind me. I looked back at her and asked, "How long?"

The process of rebuilding the lab equipment was accelerated somewhat by virtue of Miranda finding many of the items she needed damaged, but repairable, on Lazarus station. Some things needed to be rebuilt entirely, but many of the requisite items were salvageable. I spent my days trying to busy myself as a useful lab assistant, prepared meals for us, and once left Sanctum to secure additional provisions. Miranda hadn't planned on a guest during this part of the process and at one point our stores ran short. It seemed like the day would never come, but 6 weeks after I first arrived at Sanctum, Miranda made the announcement that she was ready.

We moved Shepard's nude body out of the pod and into the hospital bed. Miranda must have caught me looking jealous, because she reminded me that she'd seen all this before. This was, after all, the second time she'd done this for him. Once the leads that would implant his memories back in his head were in place, she hooked me up to the same equipment I'd been attached to the first time and she began exporting copies of our memories between my first experience on this machine and the last time I joined with him before the final assault in London. When the process completed, she began transferring them into Shepard's brain.

All that was left for me to do was wait.

I spent the next 3 days and nights in that chair, never releasing his hand, sleeping next to him, barely eating. On the fourth day, I felt his hand move and woke Miranda with a startled shriek.

"What is it?" I could hear the concern in her voice.

"He moved. His hand moved."

She rushed to the opposite side of his bed and looked down. His eyelids fluttered, his lips parted, his head moved just slightly, back and forth, until his eyes opened just enough to see me.

"Liara…"

"Yes, my love. I'm here."

"Where am I?"

"We're on Sanctum."

"The Reapers…"

"Defeated. The war is over. We did it."

"How…. What…" He looked confused, his breathing more rapid, his heart rate elevated. I brushed my fingers along his cheek, tears streaming down my face, and silenced his question with a kiss. He tasted just like I remembered, smelled just like I remembered, and his breathing slowed. His heart rate slowed, for a moment. I reached out to touch his mind and felt him welcome me like I'd just been there yesterday. It was then I knew, this was really him.

"Oh Shepard. There's so much to tell you."


End file.
